I’m a PC, and switching to Snow Leopard was my solution.
I recently dumped my old Dell for a new and flashy MacBook Pro. I will be upfront and say that I never had a chance to see Windows 7 in action, I just got too fed-up with the way Vista was working to hold out for 7. That said, I love my new Mac. I have Snow Leopard, and I’m working through the learning curve of all the nifty shortcuts and applications, and the general life-changing implications that come with being a Mac owner. For example, I’m going to the gym more, I eat better, and I sleep at night. Maybe that is related to getting laid more, maybe it is related to having a spiffy chromed out laptop, or possibly some intersection of the two. I’ll never really know. What I do know is that the glass of my life is not only half-full, it is half-full of a Cocoa-Mocha Stout.
On the topic of Cocoa, what the hell is it? No, I don’t mean the version that men buy for their girlfriends when they are feeling uncreative, or like they should apologize. This is apparently some kind of Objective-C for Macs. XCode, which is the Mac version of Visual Studio, seems to provide support for Cocoa almost exclusively at first glance. I had to troll a bit on Google (which the WordPress spell checker doesn’t like without a capital) to discover that the basic C++ functionality is hidden away in special project designations and even then is a bit indirect in the approach that it takes. However, after getting everything set up and a simple “Hello World” program written, the entire process becomes quite nice, and the application rewarded me with the Terminal session greeting that I was looking for.
All of this was accomplished while eating lunch in-between classes, which is a 1 hour break. Given that, I’m excited to continue to learn the new features and shortcuts available, as well as continue on my quest to complete my programming knowledge by becoming as good in Objective-C as I am in Java.
Red.
As much as I hate to know that I am going to have a Mac Fan Boy hanging around I guess I will welcome it as a learning experience. Cocoa to my knowledge is a language used to develop GUI programs for Leopard. That is about all I know.
I honestly thought you would have skipped over apple and went to one of the many developer (hint c++) friendly Linux environment.
I still haven’t gotten very far into how this beast works, but there is always the option of grabbing some version of Linux, and throwing it into BootCamp. I’m taking a course that culminates in the creation of a game, and I believe that my group has opted to write in c++, so I am confident that I will know what a good answer to this is in the near future.